FRANCE is a nation in decline, blind to its failings and living beyond its means while strutting with empty arrogance on the world stage.

That may sound like the standard Francophobe rant from across the Channel or the Atlantic but it is, surprisingly, a view gaining ground in France.

Doubts about Gallic supremacy have been a periodic feature of France for centuries. They have now returned, fed by economic gloom and amplified by bestselling books. France, according to the thesis, has been overtaken by Britain and others because it atrophied as a centralised welfare state in the 1970s.

Before leaving to lecture the United Nations on the superiority of the French world view this week, President Chirac was forced to respond to the doom-mongers with a morale-boosting speech. France was bursting with health, he insisted to a provincial au- dience. In Paris, the claim was given as much credence as his line that “France has no quarrel with the United States”.

Jean-Pierre Raffarin, the Prime Minister, hammered home his boss’s message this week, saying: “I do not believe that France is in decline.”

The words of the now unloved Prime Minister were undermined yesterday when he unveiled a 2004 budget that expects minimal growth, takes national debt up to record level and busts a hole in the EU’s ceiling for public deficits for a third successive year.

Big corporate bankruptcies and spring strikes by the public sector and entertainment workers preceded a summer of forest fires and a heatwave that was officially blamed yesterday for 14,800 deaths.

The mood is being fanned by three books which argue that there is nothing temporary about France’s troubles. With its chronic unemployment and dinosaur centralised state, France can no longer pose as a universal model of progress and civilisation, they argue. In L’Arrogance Française, Romain Gubert and Emmanuel Saint-Martin, both journalists, say that France infuriates the rest of the world with its discredited diplomacy.

In Adieu à la France qui s’en va (Farewell to a France that is departing) Jean-Marie Rouart, a novelist and member of the august Académie Française, says that France is losing its soul to mediocrity and needs a great leader to restore its grandeur. The biggest splash is being made by La France Qui Tombe (Collapsing France) by Nicolas Baverez, an historian and economist.

Baverez says that, after three postwar decades of progress, France lost its way under the fourteen-year left-wing reign of François Mitterrand and eight years under M Chirac. Hostages to tyrannical state sector unions, farmers, subsidised film-makers and other interest groups, successive governments have squandered national wealth and heritage to maintain a protectionist, Soviet-style state, he says.

He also draws unfavourable comparisons with Britain, the favourite destination for French emigrants in the past decade. British per capita income has overtaken that of France, where taxes are now much higher. Britons pay 45 per cent of their income to the state in taxes, compared with 75 per cent for the French. Baverez says that Britain has taken over the European Union, monopolising its top jobs and imposing a British stamp on the new draft constitution. France, in turn, has alienated its neighbours by playing fast and loose with the EU rules.

Abroad, M Chirac’s posturing had made a laughing stock of France. “In the Iraq crisis, France has suffered a diplomatic Agincourt,” he says.

France faces a choice, Baverez concludes: “Shock therapy that will modernise the country through a forced march” or the pursuit of decline that will produce social upheaval and feed the far Right of Jean-Marie Le Pen. France, he says, is ripe for a near-revolutionary change such as when it summoned Charles de Gaulle as its saviour in 1958.

The Left is accusing him of “declinism”, an old right-wing obsession that fed Fascism in the 1930s. Attacks are also coming from the Right. Figaro said: “This mood of ‘francopessimism’ is creating an unhealthy atmosphere which carries the stigma of the 1930s.” But, it added: “The roots of the evil are in our statist culture, something that the British threw out ages ago.”

The bulk of the reaction, holds that Baverez makes good points but neglects France’s qualities, such as the reforms that have opened markets, its place as Europe’s top recipient of foreign investment, and a quality of life that remains the envy of the world.

A powerful defence of the decline thesis came in Le Monde from Marc Fumaroli, an eminent historian and a professor at the University of Chicago, who said that France, for all its undoubted glories, was suffering from a general “irritation, frustration and demoralisation” that was more bitter and deep than anywhere else in Europe or in the US.

Deprived of a leader with the vision of Thatcher, Reagan or Blair, it had been left to stagnate, he said.

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